Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/277

 President Davis in Reply to General Sherman. 271

an imbecile scold or an infamous slanderer — as either, he is harm - less.

The statement on page 3. that a box containing private papers^ of mine was found at the house of my brother, Joseph E. Davis, is untrue. The error in the place where a box was seized by his pil- lagers would not have been material if made by a truthful man, but when an habitual falsifier falls into even a slight error of locality, it is not surprising that he should be suspected of having intentionally fixed upon my brother's residence to give point and probability to some other falsehood, ihe box of papers was found at a farmer's house several miles away from my brother's, and the box did not contain a single letter written to me or by me 2Lt Montgomery. There- fore Sherman's statement that he abstracted from that box three let- ters which had been written to me by loyal officers of the United States army, and returned to the writers to protect them from the suspicion of complicity with the Government at Montgomery, can have no other foundation in truth than, probably, the discovery of letters written at former times and received by me before the inauguration of the Con- federate Government at Montgomery.

It is due to the memory of the late Alexander H. Stephens, whose letter to Herschel V. Johnson has been made the foundation for this vile assault upon myself, to say, that if the letter is genuine, and has not been altered to serve Sherman's malice against myself, that it was written under excitement and when disappointment and apprehension of our overthrow had influenced his judgment and opinion, and that this private letter, written under its attending circumstances, never intended for publication, and expressing hasty opinions, will not be allowed to cast its shadow over the carefully-prepared history of the war which Mr. Stephens has left to inform posterity of his views of public men and measures. I will be pardoned for extracting from Mr. Stephens's ''War between the States" remarks compli- mentary to myself, since they completely refute the purpose for which the Johnson letter has been produced. In Volume II, pages 624-5, commenting upon the meeting at the African church, in Richmond, after the unsuccessful effort for peace in Hampton Roads, Mr. Ste- phens says :

"Many who had heard this master of oratory in his most brilliant displays in the Senate and on the hustings said they never before saw Mr. Davis so really majestic! The occasion and the effects of the speech, as well as all the circumstances under which it was made,